Slack had an in to expand and capture what eventually became 365, but they didn’t do it and Microsoft caught up and captured it.

> by most accounts Slack is a better product

Perhaps but it doesn't seem customers value it very much.

> I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand alone product each company had to buy per user that it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.

To me the fact that people would pay for a chat app was an oddity in the first place. Skype (the consumer version) was mostly free.

Consumers maybe... Business pay for these things all the time.

Webex, Zoom, Teams, GoToMeeting, etc etc etc

Then if you add in other communications tools you can include many many other things businesses pay for